John McGuinness (Carlow-Kilkenny, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

At last week's meeting we noted the audits of different organisations, one of which was the Cork Institute of Technology. It is similar and the same recommendations could be made for CIT. We noted that audit and maybe we should not have noted it because a report was provided through this committee to the Department that raised serious concerns about a range of issues in CIT. There is a problem in the whole education sector with how they are made accountable, how transparent they are and so on. At the end of the hearing with WIT, we got our information and it was obvious what we concluded from it. Then similar circumstances prevailed in CIT. We have still not received the report on that from the Department of Education and Skills. Too much time elapses between the committee hearing evidence, getting information or getting reports from anonymous sources and getting a reply from the Department. We can learn from WIT, but we need to ask the Department for a speedy response to all the issues raised in the context of that report we received about CIT.

We move on to the land swap.